Interview with Mark Plimsoll
Reader Views welcomes Mark Plimsoll, author of the creative non-fiction memoir “WMD Machete.” Mark is being interviewed by Juanita Watson, Assistant Editor of Reader Views. Juanita: Thanks for talking with us today, Mark. Would you tell us about the personal experience you relate in your unique memoir “WMD Machete”?
Juanita: What inspired you to write your book? Mark: After I returned home in 1976, I wanted to describe things I found difficult to say aloud. After thirty years working on it, I realized my experience might help others understand the near future, when our Hispanic population becomes America's largest minority. WMD Machete offers a frame of reference into the Third World, and a glimpse of the United States from their viewpoint. Juanita: Mark, you have a unique gift for storytelling. What is your writing background and have you had any other works published? Mark: From second through fifth grade, I walked to a one-room school in the basement of a country church next to a graveyard, and that made me fearless or suicidal, I don't know which. In Junior High, I liked to read the Encyclopedia Britannica to Tarzan, Tom Sawyer, and Science Fiction, with a wide detour around romantic literature. In High School, I decided to become a writer-artist. In College, Art teachers stressed the importance of 'having something to say,' and that artists use their experiences to create portraits of their era. So I dropped out of higher education and opted for a 'lower' self-education of explorations in menial jobs, art and music, and spiritual quests to avoid the academic world's armchair confection of reality. To develop my writing skills, I attended seminars, joined writer's groups, took creative writing in Spanish with journalists in Mexico, and read a lot. Juanita: Who will connect with your book? Who do you envision reading it? Most readers could enjoy it as a Huckleberry Finn picaresque adventure, to laugh along with my culture shock when confronted with the strange, the ridiculous, and the dangerous. I planned to write a small adventure book about my six months of travel and the earthquake, but after five hundred pages and thirty years later, I realized the book illustrates a schizophrenic modern reality inherited from three thousand years of history, and might help our 'First World' become more interested in developing nations. I also describe the rustbelt Industrial reality I fled from, for parity, as a warning to developing nations. WMD Machete carries a Creative Commons copyright, which allows citizens of Developing Nations (as defined by the World Bank) to download electronic versions, print it out, copy it, or publish it and if it sells, keep the money, as long as they attribute Mark Plimsoll as the author. Juanita: When did you travel to Latin America and what motivated you to go on this adventure? Mark: In sixth grade, my teacher, a man in his thirties, lost control of the students during a lecture about South America. As he slumped over his desk, he said "If you ever get the chance to go to South America, just go." I swear, I saw him wipe away a tear. I thought about that for years. I first entered Tijuana, Mexico in February of 1972 with a couple of sailors that picked me up hitchhiking through Los Angeles. This introduced me to the Ugly American phenomenon- our cultural myopia and sense of superiority. A Mexican police officer heard one of the sailors curse at him in English under his breath. He motioned to a passing police car, and then handcuffed the sailor to haul him away. The sailor caught up with us hours later, after a short stay in jail where even through a language barrier, they took all his cash, except taxi fare. Back home from that trip, I found work with temporary work agencies and in a bread factory, and took two semesters of Spanish. I moved to Aspen in January of 1975 and slept in my car a couple of nights, not a good idea. That October, I returned to Michigan and hitchhiked south from there. I wanted to see how the "other half" live. I headed for Guatemala, because Encyclopedia Britannica said incomes average a dollar a day. Juanita: Would you tell us more about the devastating earthquake that happened while you were there and the effect it had on you then and now? Mark: WMD Machete lists all the statistics in the back pages. The earthquake consisted of a couple of weeks of temblors, but the first quake, 7.5 on the Richter scale, lasted about forty seconds and displaced an entire river valley a yard and a half. It opened up chasms nine feet across, along a fault-line one hundred and fifty miles long. The vibrations sped through the earth at fourteen thousand miles an hour, and released energy equivalent to thirty thousand atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima, around twenty thousand tons of TNT. Inconceivable. For Guatemala, the size of Tennessee with twenty-seven volcanoes, that one brief event left one fifth of the population without homes, whole villages buried under landslides, around twenty three thousand dead, and nearly seventy-six thousand injured. I came out of it with bruised kidneys and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Mom claims I became hyperactive. Back home, I slept about five hours a night, and worked as a musician and portrait artist. I moved around, and changed cities about every two years. Since them, I keep up with things Pan-American. Twenty-two years later, in 1998, I became fluent in Spanish after a year and a half as a pauper among Mexicans in the Yucatan peninsula. Mark: So many things can happen in six months, especially to a restless young man who travels alone. As a literary experiment, I wrote WMD Machete as a literary experiment, in first person without the passive voice, and tried to keep the essence of Brandon's youthful voice- his wide-eyed wonder, critical skepticism, and vivid impressions of culture shock in an exotic reality. I wanted to discover how the other half lives, so my book does not simply list tourist destinations, although I lived for a month in one tiny Pacific Beach community that became an ecological reserve. A Californian man, who kidnapped his own daughter, told me I could travel back in time to a place without electricity, to this beach community where he planned to hide from his wife's Mafia family. In one decrepit Guatemala City hotel full of taxidermy nightmares, I met the Negro Princess of Nicaragua's Mosquito Indians. She wanted to help her people, so she asked everyone for money and pawned her jewelry to finance a letter-writing campaign to beg world leaders for help. In a Mayan Indian village on the shore of the world's most beautiful lake, I met a sixteen-year old Californian Tarzan who lived alone. We hooked up with a mother-son journalist duo on the run from homicidal Guatemalan upper class, and smoked dope in their car while we passed trucks full of soldiers. Superstitious Indians in Bat-jackets attacked us with machetes. We heard about how people disappeared, a euphemism for murder. I met so many people and had so many adventures, it became a big book. I added bizarre Meso-American archeological data to add three thousand years of context to show how things don't change much. Magical thinking and pyramid hierarchies of acquisition and domination characterize most human societies, with a politic of hegemony through trade and warfare. Juanita: What were the most profound defining moments for you? Mark: Picking up a highly venomous sea snake and opening its mouth illustrates the advantages of blissful ignorance. The environment's bats, the beautiful stately Ceiba trees, four-eyed fish, jaguars, volcanoes, caves, tropical cloudbursts, hurricanes, and giant toads offered insights into Mayan art and belief systems. Speeding down the gravel highway to Tikál, I all but bounced off the top of an old yellow school bus in a mad grab for a tiny vest-pocket journal, as it fluttered away into a jungle canyon. That taught me the value of my own journalism. A young college student wanted to convince me that the United States overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president in 1954. He said that since then, the U.S. controls who becomes president in spite of democratic processes. This changed the way I saw the convenience of Guatemala's dollar equal to the U.S. dollar, and the presence of huge U.S. factories in Guatemala City. Some University professors who oversaw a Peace Corp project confirmed what he said, and then saved me from becoming a bullet-ridden corpse in the Pacific Ocean. At the end of the book, twenty years after the earthquake, my Austrian immigrant Grandmother, who disowned me as a disloyal American, contacted me after her rich second-husband died. In WMD Machete, she serves to remind us that only the rich can afford to disown people, while poor people tend to help each other. Juanita: How did your experiences in Latin America change you as an American? Mark: Once you cross our southern border, the philosophy of life changes. The U.S. American's work ethic, "Live to Work," helped us create a society where both parents must work. So who raises children? Perhaps as a result, fifty percent of America's schoolchildren now live with only one parent. In Hispanic America, people work to live, to enjoy life with their family and friends in a world where newspapers carry sensual art, and popular music consists of shamelessly earthy and passionate song lyrics, which audiences of all ages sing along to. Many Americans make economic slaves of themselves with a false ideal of rugged individualism, and then assuage their anti-social lifestyle and generalized anxiety with consumerism and substance abuse. This contrasts with Hispanic America's values which revolve around extended families and interconnectedness. We get kicked out of the nest at eighteen; many married Hispanics live with their parents. Because of this complex preoccupation with family, it took thirty years to translate the famous Sixties book about woman's health, "Our Bodies, Ourselves." With insights like these about the human condition, my outspoken distrusted of cultural assumptions made it hard for me to fit in anywhere. Juanita: Mark, you consider yourself a global citizen. Can you explain that term? Mark: Take the name Mark Plimsoll. The name comes from a line put on boats at the carrying capacity, the "Plimsoll Mark" or "Plimsoll Line." Carrying capacity also refers to the peak population an ecosystem can support. Many misanthropes say humans overpopulate the earth. Americans see the 9/11 deaths as important, instead of a mere trifle at around three thousand deaths. More people die every day around the world from smoking American cigarettes, or from car accidents in the United States alone. The equivalent of twenty jumbo jets full of babies die every day because they lack ten-dollar mosquito nets. The infant mortality from contaminated air and water, inner city lifestyles, and needless war that serves arms merchants and associated industries continues to climb while we in the so-called developed world refuse to notice. We practice ignorance as a national hobby. I do not know how many people can inhabit the earth, but decades ago, we passed the number of consumers the earth can sustain. Unfortunately, the powers that be define progress as continued economic growth. Subservience to the bottom line causes well-meaning people to promote this Consumer lifestyle, based upon the use of millions of years of sunlight, stored as oil, burnt in mere decades. Without this rapid burning of the stored energy from ancient forests and sea plants, perhaps Earth's climate would enter an ice age. This planet exists as a closed system that supports life- a cyclical, sustainable reuse of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen in complex chemical processes fueled by sunlight, whose general health depends upon uncontaminated water and air. Industrial production contaminates to save money and therefore maximize profits. Global Citizens understand this, and change their lifestyle, and try to convince others to recognize their responsibilities to promote healthy, sustainable, life-affirming lifestyles through government policies. If everyone tried to live within ten miles of work, we could bike, stay healthy, and eliminate our oil shortage overnight. We'd care about the air we breath, because bikers recognize the stench of each car that passes as contamination. Everybody in America should understand and remember that a purposeful campaign by our auto industries destroyed our Mass transit systems, to their profit. Even food production became industrialized. The amount of grain fed to feedlot animals to produce one meal would feed ten people a vegetarian meal of better nutritional quality. The fertilizer and waste runoff of human activity creates huge dead zones in the oceans' coastal areas which doubled every decade since the Sixties. The United States uses a flawed value system to evaluate choices, both personal and governmental, because no one noticed when our constitution, written by farmers who resented taxation, became outdated by the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Americans do not understand Human Rights because public education ignores them, yet most new European countries adopt them into their constitutions, instead of copying our Constitution. Human Rights defines individual freedoms, but more important, they suggest what we deserve from our governments, because we pay taxes. In the United States, the rich fund election campaigns, and that helps ensure the trillions of dollars spent around the world on industrialization and war. In other words, our tax dollars flow into the world's militaries and private U.S. companies that produce arms and other goods for strategic support. Taxes should go towards our common welfare, to ensure peace and tranquility, not fund worldwide projects of social injustice and murder to serve the greedy. People who I regard as Global Citizens see a bigger picture, where written history appears corrupted by Academia's pandering to warlords, to male instincts of acquisition and domination. If people choose healthy lifestyles that minimize the use of oil, it might force governments and institutions around the world to spend money on quality of life and education, with a guaranteed living wage for workers to support their families, and social security for all citizens. Human Rights implies that governments ensure the quality of life both for born citizens, and for anyone who freely crosses national borders to embark on a new life in another society. There's a game theory model with some relevance to humans, called Hawks and Doves. Scientists use it to evaluate Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. A group of all Doves becomes unstable because it will lose to any Hawk, but an all-Hawk group runs substantial interpersonal risk to each individual's wellbeing, therefore also unstable. Unfortunately, scientists rarely observe that one murdered Dove probably makes Hawks out of the members of three generations of that victim's extended family. That exponentially increases the number of dangerous Hawks running around. Juanita: Mark, why do you think it is so important to travel to other countries? Mark: As distinct from the flights to destinations that constitute tourism, travel consists of journeys to discover how other people live. Other languages do not translate word for word, not even concept for concept. Concepts, the building blocks of internal reality, do not translate exactly and so in language acquisition the frame of reference widens, to recognize the relativity of assumptions and values, of 'goodness and badness.' Illogical traditions may restrict someone's human rights yet uphold a complex social order that evolved to its current state over centuries, or even millennia. Magic thinking dominates most human behavior, even in the developed world's mass media, which wants to convince us we can buy a solution to any problem (like the hybrid car, thought the costs and contamination of production often nullify potential gas savings) and promulgates Consumer culture with little no analysis of quality of life. Tobias Shneebaum, a New York artist and writer, lived with cannibals in Peru in the 1950s and later among the Asmat of New Guinea, and thought he found a humanism that our developed world lacks. I can believe it. Juanita: Did you find what were you searching for when you set out on your journey? Mark: No. I wanted to find a paradise on a dollar a day. I found poverty and marginalization, but infused with an interpersonal grace and a joy of living. The earthquake brutally revealed the fragility of our tenure on earth. My understanding of History became double sided, or multi-faceted, when I learned that in 1954, the CIA and the corporate interests of the United States Government thwarted the Guatemalan Government's first steps to create a more just society, and so the U.S. might reasonably take the blame for Guatemala's fifty years of nightmare. That knowledge began to unveil for me the international face of the United States. For all our hollow posturing as benefactors who offer the world a dowry of foreign aid, the flag too often follows business. Military support of extra-national business interests became our principal method of expansion at least since we overthrew the Queen of Hawaii in the mid eighteen hundreds, in support of the sons of missionaries who stole Hawaii's sugar and pineapples (the international symbol of hospitality!). All my life since a teenager, I listened to shortwave radio most nights to fall asleep, and heard alternative views of world news. Recently, months before American media picked up the story, European nations clamored for an explanation of the prisoners the American military flew to bases in Europe for torture. Now our president convinced Congress to pass laws to continue these barbarities. Which is worse, a primitive, undereducated, fanatically religious and bankrupt army squad that cuts off a man's head on television or the world's only super-power that anonymously drops bombs on weddings? WMD Machete hopes to rekindle human interest in a world that desperately needs the attention of people with heart instead of handguns. Juanita: Would you share your thoughts on the potential solutions you offer in “WMD Machete,” towards creating a more balanced society? Mark: First and most obvious, I believe no democratic society will implement social justice unless they elect women. WMD Machete illustrates the situation in Central America as an inheritance of three thousand years dominated by a priesthood of men. I believe social change occurs through language. America, to its credit, virtually eliminated the world niggar from its vocabulary, except among African-Americans. Hispanics need to cleanse their language of misogyny. We all need to stop thinking about automobiles as a two-ton piece of jewelry used to make a personal statement about our net worth, and instead, think of them as simple personal transporter to get our family to the Mass Transit station. A solution in one word is not Tolerance, but Acceptance. Nobody wants to feel tolerated, but we should all practice acceptance. Then we reap mutual respect, and can discuss our slight differences, and in peace, reach agreements about accommodations. A solution in a phrase? Human Rights. Even the 'Greatest Generation' took too long to see the obvious evil of Hitler's racist ideology. That delayed our entry into World War II. Subsequent generations of Americans lack a frame of reference to evaluate ideologies and policies as good or evil (order or chaos), because America's public education ignores Human Rights. Knowledge and respect for Human Rights educates people so they may recognize and vilify anything that impinges upon anyone's rights, especially a country that wages war on another under false pretenses. In democracies, citizens deserve the government they elect; we allowed the United States of America to become a global evil, and our ideology constitutes a clear and present danger to our species' future survival, and yet we can't see it. With clearly defined problems, the solutions become easier to find. We ignore Human Rights, because we never learned about them. In the early 1980s, Jonathan Kwitney wrote a couple of great books that illustrate uncomfortable aspects of our foriegn policies, trashing democracies and installing long-term dictators. We continue to promote our concept of progress, solely defined by economic indicators, divorced from issues that define quality of life, and imperil the planet. And most Americans don't seem to care. We also export obesity, diabetes, asthma, etc. along with industrial development. Next time you drive down the street, take a long look at everything related to automobiles; the drive-through restaurants and convenience stores, gas stations, auto parts, the Super Stores and Shopping Malls with acres of parking space. Then remember that in Switzerland, where the bike to person ration is one to one, people do fifty percent of their trips by bike. Americanized' Mexicans and other First World Hispanics now eat more meat, lose touch with their family, mimic ads of people smoking and drinking, and their Catholic superficiality exacerbates auto addiction so they patronize the new car market much more so than equally poor 'Anglos.' Of course, that seven-hundred dollars a month outlay for a new vehicle short-changes their human potential, their children's future opportunities and personal values, and helps explain why they so easily fall into poverty. Hispanics tend not to save. For the past thirty years, I biked to work everywhere I lived except for one job in San Diego (but then San Diego's trolley system allowed me to bike to the trolley and then it carried both me and bicycle to Tijuana. Very cool.) If we tried to replace most of our daily trips by car with a walk, the bicycle, or mass transit, our consumption of energy would plummet, the environment would start to cleanse itself, we would lose weight, regain our health and feel better, and probably live longer. The greedy super-class, which depends on oil and related industrial revenues, will lose money. Imagine, if everyone bought a used car and cancelled their seven hundred dollar a month car payment, they and could spend those savings on art, or education, travel, etc. If we all tried to walk, bike, and take mass transit, we might pull off our earbud headphones more often and start to talk to each other again, and maybe feel better about ourselves and those unlike us. People might even spurn those who drive Hummers. Probably not. But we should. Some want to believe we could avoid global warming by experimenting with new, unproven technologies such as solar or wind energy harvesting (but they may also pump excess energy and contaminants into our planet's closed, overheating system) so we can continue to drive vehicles as much as we like. That way, we could stay fat, unhealthy, and diabetic as we drive our asthmatic children to school every day. Or we might plant a whole lot of trees and plants, use bio-fuels, and paint all top surfaces white to reflect more sunlight, but the rest of the world's individuals will still want a personal auto. Demographics predict our future world's population will live in cities. Maybe we should do all of the above, so we could all continue to drive around. Looks like God, or evolution, designed humans with an auto-ownership gene. Maybe it's the naughtiness gene, the animal's curious need to explore and take risks, run amok. Juanita: What statements are you making towards immigration and the mingling of North and South America in “WMD Machete”? Mark: About five U.S. American media conglomerates, controlled by corporate and therefore political interests, want to make us xenophobic and intolerant, often called 'racist,' to play upon the human's instinctual reaction to fast changes within any community. Corporate America wants American citizens to blame someone else for the erosion of the middle class's levels of income, influence, and affluence. This will exonerate the invisible Superclass, motivated by unmitigated greed, who profit as arms and oil merchants, and enjoy international prestige and privilege. President Bush's real friends are Saudis and Kuwaitis, co-investors, not the down-home 'cowboys' and Hispanic 'Indians' of his adopted Texas, not the salt of the earth, not those left stranded in New Orleans after Katrina, not the common citizens of America, not even the religious right he duped for his Skull and Bones cronies. We use one quarter of this planet's resources, and control almost two thirds. Our so-called immigration problem stems from fifty years of foreign policies that looted the rest of the world. Of course people try to come here; not much left back home. We think of ignorance as passivity. It also comes from the purposeful action to ignore. No one argues against more knowledge, yet prideful Americans ignore the rest of the world. Some want to create an English-only United States. Too many wallow in a Super-power superiority complex, offer fanatical religious support for right-wing Christian war-mongers who started many of earth's nastiest wars to usher in the apocalypse, and tend to believe the 'fair and balanced' newscaster-cronies of Big Business. We should admit we don't know everything, get curious, get a short-wave radio, open our browsers, our ears and our hearts to others. I hope one day, citizens of the United States will respect the Human Rights of those other Americans that speak Spanish, and recognize them as American residents of a future bilingual Pan-America, two and a half continents in two hemispheres, at peace with the world. We should look forward to that mix of sober logic, bland food, social responsibility, clumsy dancing, and dispassionate interpersonal style of Anglo-Saxon cultures with the best of the Hispanic's overt sensuality, passion for living, spicy foods, and extended familial traditions of nurture, to produce new, sustainable cultures where science and the humanities both progress to improve everyone's quality of life. Juanita: How can readers find out more about you and your endeavors? Mark: Try my website www.MarkPlimsoll.Com or readers can Google me, and I'll try not to giggle. Juanita: Mark, you have certainly given us much to think about. Your book “WMD Machete” is a serious creative work of art, and readers will be intrigued with what you have to say. Do you have any last thoughts today? Mark: I guess final questions and last thoughts belong to God, so in deference, I hope readers will find WMD Machete a deeply spiritual work, one that addresses the problem of our left-brain dominated culture with suggestions about how to connect the right hemisphere. I grew up in the country, and the happiness of animals continues to amaze me. Yesterday the Nightly News showed us elephants recognizing themselves in mirrors. They join humans, chimpanzees, great apes, and porpoises with this level of self-awareness. I hope that most people find the concept of human beings as the Eyes of the Universe, or by extension, God's mirror, not only comforting, but a responsibility. WMD Machete tries to prove that human beings can exist in a non-neurotic, non-anxious, sustainable and peaceful relationship with nature and each other. Quality time, quality of life, there's precious little of it left in workaholic America. |
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